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How the US is Trailing Behind in Our Response to COVID-19

 

“Shelter in place” mandates are starting to appear in cities all around the United States. Some people may be wondering why we are starting to take such drastic measures, and the reason is a complete fail from the government to get us prepared for the oncoming outbreak. While countries like South Korea have been rigorously testing daily since February, the United States is still slow to ramp up our testing capacity. I wanted to explore how far behind we are on the curve.

Data was pulled from US and South Korea CDC pages between February 8 and March 15. For the US data, I used Python and BeautifulSoup to scrape the data from HTML tables. For the South Korea information, data was manually inputed from the press release pages. The press release format differed each day, so was unable to use a web scraper.

Daily COVID-19 Testing in US and South Korea

 

Number of People Tested in Each State

So far, the US has only tested 0.00097% of its total population.

US_test_cases.png
korea_test_cases.png

South Korea has tested 50x the amount that US has tested.

A Call for Collaboration:

I believe in the power of people coming together to advocate for a systematic change. I spent years advocating for these public health changes with Doctors Without Borders. There are so many efforts right now to model and visualize the impact of COVID-19 on our world. Let’s do it together. Please get in touch:

  • If you work in public health and need help

  • If you are a data scientists wanting to connect with public health

  • If you are an artist that wants to help visualize information

Let’s talk: hi@vivianpeng.com

I am a data scientist and artist with a masters in public health. This is the reason I entered into this work, to bridge the gap between data folks and public health folks. Let’s work together to advocate for our needs and communicate knowledge.

Fork and clone my repo for this project here: